Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Today's vogue for transit-oriented development (TOD) owes a lot to Ebenezer Howard's Garden
City. Image courtesy of Wayne M. Davis
In addition to advocating for an ideal future, each diagram rather summarily undiagrams
the past. When the early-20th-century stenographer and amateur inventor Ebenezer
Howard considered the pollution and chaos of the industrial city, he saw centralization
as the main problem. Howard's influential 1902 publication Garden Cities of ToMorrow laid out his concept for a sequence of small "smokeless, slumless cities"
extending over the English countryside, separated by idyllic greenbelts and linked by
railroads and canals. Planned as communities of 32,000, Howard's garden cities would
relieve the congestion of urban centers and offer workers the best of city and country
life, complete with collectivist yet quaintly British social services (ahem, "homes for
waifs"!).
Howard's ideal cities inspired the development of two communities near London
Letchworth and Welwynbut they also anticipated one of today's important planning
trends. As Ben Grant, SPUR's public realm and urban design program manager, writes
in the show's accompanying essay, "Nearly a century later the graphic treatment of
circular pearls on a string of transit infrastructure would be picked up by planners
advocating transit-oriented development."
The architectural draftsman Hugh Ferriss's 1922 charcoal sketches of imaginary Manhattan
skyscrapers. Image courtesy of SPUR
There's nothing like a freshly drafted building code to stoke the fires of artistic
inspiration. As new construction techniques and the birth of the elevator made
skyscrapers a possibility for the first time, the concept of air rightsand a new form of
legal battlewas just waiting to be invented. In the 1920s, Progressive Era laws
introduced setback rules to preserve light, air, and views, and to prevent eager builders
from turning surface streets into dark, cavernous places. Armed with a code book and a
set of charcoals, the architectural draftsman Hugh Ferriss sketched out the implications
of the new law, turning dry code stipulations into brooding drawings of what must be the
most responsibly proportioned Batcave ever.
Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome emphasizes urban pattern by highlighting streets in
white. Image courtesy of SPUR
Like the wheels on our food trucks and fixed-gear bikes, aerial-view maps may
not seem like such a revelation. But the way they define space says a lot about who a
city is for. By rendering travel routes in white, Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map of Rome
emphasizes the logic of the streets and the navigability of the city. But when modernists
came along in the mid-20th century, they reversed positive and negative space,
showing buildings in white and everything else as an undifferentiated void. "In the ethos
of modernism, the building is this sacred object that needs to be set off in a vast field of
space," explains Grant. "But from the point of view of a human being moving through
that space, it's a very anxiety-producing environment."
Grant contrasts modernism's wide, undefined voids between buildings with traditional
urbanism, which uses readable street edges and recurring, human-scale patterns and
paths to allow pedestrians to easily orient themselves within the larger landscape. "If
you imagine yourself standing in the middle of a housing project or a mall with a giant
parking lot, that's not a very pleasant place to be a human being, but it's hard to put
words to why," he says. In the 1970s, planners revived Nolli's convention of using white
for streets as a way of articulating the failings of modernist schemes. Adds Grant, "It's
such a hard thing to explain, but when you see one of these images, it's like,
'That's what a traditional city does that the modernist city doesn't do.'"
Guy Debords 1957 "Guide Psychogeographique de Paris" maps a walk through Paris as a
series of personal encounters with the unfolding city. Image courtesy of SPUR
The Situationist and theorist Guy Debord also took issue with modernism's urban
renewal schemes, but he didn't mess with subtleties like positive and negative space.
Instead, Debord took scissors to a map of Paris and reordered the city to align with his
own experience. He and the Situationists saw cities not as rationally gridded places, but
as "psychogeographies" stitched together from the sum of everybody's individual
encounters with the city. His highly subjective 1957 "map" of Paris shows one route
through a collection of favorite spots.
A parklet outside the Sea Rocket Bistro in San Diego. Photo courtesy of Bike San Diego.
Today's tactical urbanists look at the city a little like Debord did, seeking to construct
small but felicitous interactions for urban dwellers with parklets, DIY seating, and giant
shady parasols. Like our forebears, "we are very attracted to ideal cities right now, but it's
a different vision," says Grant. "People are excited about urbanism, so our ideal cities
tend to be full of people, which is really wonderful and reflects some hard-fought
learning about what cities are."
And now that this corrective approach to modernism's legacy has brought people back
to the center of cities, we're starting to get ambitious again: "We have big problems to
tackle, and so our dreams are getting bigger accordingly. In that sense we have
something in common with the utopian movements of the past. Hopefully we've learned
something, because we're putting people in them, and we have a sense of what urban
form is."